Outsorcery

“Really? I thought you were doing that. All those trips, ahem, ”overseas” and stuff. Those gifts to the kids that the feds got so interested in. The spooks just swarming over that Plantir…”

“Look, it was a fugging disaster. Once the Dwarves found out that the aluminum beer cans we were passing off as “super mithril” were for beer, we had a bunch of angry midgets on our hands demanding Coors and full disclosure of the Periodic Table of the Elements. We’re still trying to convince them that the Lanthanides and Actinides don’t exist. Can you imagine what they’re going to do once they discover Uranium? Goodbye, Mordor. Hellllo glowing hole in the ground. Where are we going to get Orcs then?

“And the Elves got pretty bored with the Disney crap we were foisting off on them when they discovered Harley Davidson and leather. Now there probably isn’t a single god damned elf who doesn’t have a pair of shit-kickers, a wallet with a chain and at least three tattoos.

“Don’t get me started about code quality. The elves? They wrote wonderful code, simply bee-yoo-ti-ful stuff, but maintain it? Nooooo. They’d give you a module or two, then flip over to some entirely new language a month later. One release you’d get continuation-passing style and tail-recursion so efficient you could cry, but the next month you’d be dealing with monads, and the following we’d get page after page of Y-combinator crap maybe mixed in with FORTH or Jovial, just for giggles. Bug free, but if you can’t modify it, who cares?

“If I never see another single line of Visual Basic written by a halfling I’ll die a happy man. Whoever told them that Access was a perfectly good database, and that surrrre you can run an enterprise with it . . . Oh God, I hate those miserable creatures, I just want to format the whole damned Shire. Dim this, Sub that, and Goto, Goto, Goto.

“On the bright side, we got some Orcs on H1-Bs and they’re working out great. They’re simply naturals at get-tough project management. You want to see Agile done right? Full-contact SCRUM is where it’s at, man. Miss a schedule and you’d better show up in battle armor. Did wonders on a few of our attitude-prone prima-donnas, now when they see Nagret or Zarbik coming down the hallway they practically scurry back to their cubes. Agile is wonderful, especially with axes and leather.